Moscow Education (Idaho)

Here are some disturbing statistics about college:

• About 55 percent of students who start college eventually earn a degree
• That drops to 24 percent for those who were in the bottom 40 percent of their high school class.
• Those who actually graduate are not necessarily well-educated. According to a 2006 Pew Charitable Trusts study,
• 50% of college seniors failed a test that required them to interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, and compare credit card offers.
• 20% of college seniors did not have the quantitative skills to estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station.
• SAT scores haven’t changed for two years in a row.
• More students are taking the ACT, which saw a slight decline in scores this year from 21.2 in 2007 to 21.1.
• College costs have risen at double the inflation rate
• Accompanying wages are not keeping up.
• At some point, the degree isn’t going to be worth it.

Doesn’t this give you a warm-fuzzy feeling?

It would make me want to ensure that my kids actually got a college diploma worth something, that’s for sure.

HT: Joanne Jacobs

Cross-posted from Joanne Jacobs:

Only 30 percent of young people 17 to 24 years old are qualified for military service; the rest are ineligible because of health issues (especially obesity), academic problems (low test scores, no diploma) or an arrest record.

The Army has started an intensive GED-prep school for recruits who test in the top half of the aptitude test but haven’t completed high school.

Their day begins in uniform at 5 a.m. with physical training. Then they attend about eight hours of academic review classes, followed by homework each evening. An hour of marching drills and military discipline is thrown in for good measure.

. . . The soldiers work in small classrooms outfitted with simple desks, chairs, and dry-erase boards. In-desk computers are used for test-taking. Grouped three to four to a class, the students hunch over special GED preparation books, working on basic math, social studies and reading selections.

A press release from Bob Hieronymus, Executive Vice President of Administration and Advancement at New Saint Andrews College:

Homeschoolers in the Pacific Northwest now have another option when it comes to teaching biology to their juniors and seniors.

This fall New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, is offering a day-long Field Entomology Science Camp with an optional correspondence unit study designed to aid homeschooling families. The camp is Friday, October 10, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and is open to home school students age 15 or older.

"This will be a great hands-on opportunity to awaken a curiosity about living creatures," said Dr. Gordon Wilson, a Senior Fellow of Natural History at New Saint Andrews. "We will delve into many important biological concepts using the wonderful world of insects as an effective means to generate a deep appreciation and fascination toward all life."

"With no classes in session during the College's fall break, it's a perfect time for us to have a camp," explained Dr. Wilson. "And with home-schooling in full swing in the fall, we have the opportunity to go beyond just a summer camp by offering an additional correspondence unit study that expands on what we'll cover during the camp," Dr. Wilson continued. "When it comes to a subject like biology, many parents feel less equipped to teach. So we hope this is a blessing to the parents as well as the students."

With early registration, tuition for the day-long camp is $64. It includes two intensive class sessions in the morning, lunch, an afternoon field trip and a late-afternoon laboratory session. For an additional $30, students can register for the correspondence unit study option which includes reading assignments, a writing project and interaction with Dr. Wilson via e-mail and phone. Enrollment is limited to 20. The camp and unit study does not result in any college credit. To register call (208) 882-1566 or e-mail Lindsey Leithart Tollefson at ltolleson@nsa.edu.

Dr. Wilson teaches Natural History (Biology) at New Saint Andrews College, in addition to electives such as Entomology, Marine Biology, and Herpetology. Dr. Wilson earned his M.S. in Entomology from the University of Idaho and a Ph.D. in Environmental Science from George Mason University (his research focus was box turtle ecology). He also was a biology faculty member at Liberty University for nearly 12 years. Dr. Wilson was recently featured in Creation Magazine and is a new contributor to Answers Magazine. He is a frequent speaker on the subject of Intelligent Design and Creation Biology.

I guess it’s better than chaining them up to their desks.

We certainly live in a different era. Can you imagine doing this to our grandparents when they were in school?

From MyWay:

Court authorities here will be able to track students with a history of skipping school under a new program requiring them to wear ankle bracelets with Global Positioning System monitoring.

But at least one group is worried the ankle bracelets will infringe on students' privacy.

Linda Penn, a Bexar County justice of the peace, said she anticipates that about 50 students from four San Antonio-area school districts - likely to be mostly high schoolers - will wear the anklets during the six-month pilot program announced Friday. She said the time the students wear the anklets will be decided on a case-by-case basis.

"We are at a critical point in our time where we can either educate or incarcerate," Penn said, linking truancy with juvenile delinquency and later criminal activity. "We can teach them now or run the risk of possible incarceration later on in life. I don't want to see the latter."

Blacks are out of options. The progressives won’t allow them the option of school choice and of sending their children to successful private schools.

This is the Dem’s version of keeping blacks on the plantation.

From the Houston Chronicle

Once seen by many blacks as something only whites do, home schooling has steadily gained momentum in the black community in the past eight years and is expected to continue to grow, say home school experts.

"Ten years ago, there were not that many people of color home schooling," said Brian Ray, president of National Home Education Research Institute in Salem, Ore.

General dissatisfaction with public schools and increased awareness about home schooling are motivating blacks to change course, experts said.

Concerns about children missing associating with other students and the loss of a spouse's income, however, keep many blacks who are interested in home schooling from taking the leap.

An estimated 220,000 black students were home schooled in 2007, according to the institute. In comparison, 84,000 were home schooled in 1999, according to a survey by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Studies show that home-schooled students do just as well or better than their public school peers. For example, they typically score 15 to 30 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests, according to the research institute.

Blacks are home schooling for many of the same reasons whites do, Ray said. They want what they consider a safer learning environment or they want to teach their own values and beliefs. They also want to try different teaching approaches and build stronger family relationships.

We can only hope that this accelerates, and that blacks become dissatisfied with the Dems being in bed with the NEA.

HT: Chris W.

Did you know that only 2 in 5 college students graduate in four years?

That means it’s cheaper to send your child to a private college with a guarantee 4–year degree than to send them to a government university for 5–7 years.

From USA Today:

As colleges welcome a record number of students this fall, they are taking steps to ensure more students actually complete a degree.

College enrollments have been on the rise for decades, but the proportion of students who earn a bachelor's degree within five years has stagnated at about 52%, down from 55% in 1988, says a report due this fall by the College Board, owner of the SAT. Some of those left behind eventually graduate, while others drop out.

Federal and state policymakers increasingly use graduation rates as one measure of a school's effectiveness. Governors of several states, including Arizona, Ohio and Michigan, are vowing to produce more graduates to meet future workforce demands.

Those are the words of a Tech School, not an educational university. The purpose of education is not to train the workforce.

Colleges also are responding to families' concerns that high tuition prices may not translate into a college degree, says Jerome Lucido, vice provost of enrollment at the University of Southern California. "We have to make sure that access to college is not an empty promise," he says.

Nothing like throwing away $30k with nothing to show for it. Now there’s a return on an investment for you.

Most colleges offer support such as orientations for first-year students, about a quarter of whom don't return for a second year. Now, colleges are expanding their efforts to other groups:

• Sophomores. Second-year students face key decisions involving their major, yet they're the "frequently neglected middle child," says Jerry Brody, of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. This fall, his campus will offer sophomores a class to help assess their strengths.

A new welcome-back event Monday at the University of South Carolina will point sophomores toward options such as study abroad. The campus loses 9%-10% of students in or just after their second year.

• Males. Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., plans this fall to sponsor a videogame tournament as one way to draw males "out of their rooms and into the community," says Tracy Gottlieb, head of a campus retention committee. Males make up 44% of the student body and are a "fragile" population, she says. "Young men are less likely to be joiners. If they're engaged, they're happy. If they're happy, they stay."

I feel better already.

HT: Adam S.

This is the closest thing to a miracle I’ve seen among the Dems in recent memory.

From Andrew J. Coulson:

Reporting from the Democratic National Convention two days ago, Salon’s Mickey Kaus was stunned to find a room packed with 500 people cheering as Newark mayor Cory Booker defended school choice. Booker complained of the viciousness of education politics, noting that “he’d been told his political career would be over if he kept pushing school choice.” And when Booker told the crowd that their party would “have to admit, as Democrats, we have been wrong on education,” he was greeted by “Loud applause!” [emphasis in Kaus' original].

Liberal columnist and Newsweek editor and Jonathan Alter, who moderated the next panel, said it would have been hard to imagine such an event at previous Democratic conventions.  According to Kaus, Alter “called it a ‘landmark’ future historians should note.”

Perhaps there is hope for American education yet.

The Idaho delegation to the Democratic National Convention were in line to be front and center -- or at least front, and a bit to the left of the podium -- for the gathering in Denver. They were, that is, until Joe Biden was named Barack Obama's running mate. That meant the delegation from Biden's home state of Delaware got moved to the foreground and Idaho got Delaware's location. A location which was described by a network news reporters as "in the nose bleed section"

—Jim Camden, Spokesman Review

Great news for WSU and the Palouse.

Now we can only hope that UI’s enrollment is way up as well.

The following article ran in today’s Lewiston Tribune.

Washington State University on Monday welcomed what it thinks will be its largest-ever freshman class.

Vice President for Enrollment Management John Fraire said the school projects about 3,350 students started their first year of college this fall semester.

That brings WSU's overall enrollment on its four statewide campuses to about 25,000, with 18,000 on the Pullman campus.

The Education Olympics is over.

Here are the details.

Rankings

The US’s one and only medal was in 9^th grade civics skills.

Way to go, USA! 

From the Washington Post:

David Whitman, in his book "Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism," reports that in Chicago, from 2003 through 2006, just three of every 1,000 teachers received an "unsatisfactory" rating in annual evaluations; in 87 "failing schools" -- with below average and declining test scores -- 69 had no teachers rated unsatisfactory; in all of Chicago, just nine teachers received more than one unsatisfactory rating and none of them was dismissed.

Sounds like the entire school system needs a dose of reality: half of the teachers are below average.

A quick review of 4^th grade math may help.

I’m appalled. Simply appalled.

I cannot imagine having had such a conversation with my parents.

From NME News:

An American teenager has dropped out of high school in order to become an expert at the video game Guitar Hero.

Blake Peebles, 16, quit his sophomore year at North Raleigh Christian Academy to concentrate on perfecting his game, which so far has seen him win prizes from gift certificates to gaming equipment and chicken sandwiches.

The Raleigh, North Carolina native’s parents hired a tutor and allowed their son to drop out of school after he wore them down with his complaints.

"We couldn't take the complaining anymore. He always told me that he thought school was a waste of time," his mother Hunter told The News & Observer.

Peebles hopes to get to professional-level gaming, which can see competitors earn from $25,000 to $80,000 per year, although the figure is usually at the lower end and sponsorship opportunities are rare for competitors who coming in any lower than first place.

HT: Omie Drawhorn

Looks like the UI’s setback may not be as detrimental as previously thought.

From the Idaho Statesman:

 Portland private college that planned to open a law school in the city by 2009 is realizing that it will cost more than anticipated and the school needs at least another year to raise the money and meet accreditation requirements.

Concordia University, which appeared to be on a fast track to open a Boise law school, needs private commitments of about $7 million to open here, not the $4 million administrators first thought.

Part of the difference is more staff - approximately 15 people instead of about 10 originally envisioned - that Concordia will need to run the school and meet requirements for accreditation from the American Bar Association, said Charles Schlimpert, Concordia's president. "We are committed, but it has got to be funded," he said.

Fundraising is continuing but will take time, Schlimpert said. "It's not like going out and raising $25 gifts."

Concordia's administrators now say it will take about 18 months to open the school, which puts the first day of class in fall 2010, if the school can have a dean and start working on the school beginning in January.  

Richard over at Why Boys Fail notes:

Preschool has changed a lot in the last couple of years — for the most part, it has become much more academic– and little boys, well, they’re about the same as they’ve always been. And lots of parents are keying into the fact that this is a problem.

How big is the problem? Walter Gilliam, a professor of child psychiatry at Yale University, regularly collects data from 3898 state sponsored preschools. In 2004, in an effort to get a handle on who was getting expelled and why, Gilliam asked the number and gender of the kids who got expelled. It turns out, the expulsion rate for preschoolers is three times higher than it is for K-12th graders. And preschool boys are expelled at 4.5 times the rate of their female classmates. Think that rate has gotten any lower? Think again. But no one is talking about it much except for a few moms in the carpool line.

Some little boys do just fine in preschool. But too many are learning a damaging lesson — that school is not for them.

Putting boys in pre-school and telling them to act like girls. Brilliant.

Peg Tyre has a book out called The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do.

This book is not going to play well with the professional educator crowd, who deny that there is any difference between boys and girls; and who seek to educate all children in a feminine cookie cutter manner.

Here’s the review from Booklist’s Vanessa Bush:

While the nation’s schools worked diligently to improve the academic performance of girls—including closing the achievement gap in math and science between girls and boys—few noticed the slow and steady decline in the academic performance of boys.

The reading and writing achievement gap between girls and boys continues as boys also stack up unfavorably in every measure from school discipline, to graduation rates, to grades, to college admission.

Newsweek reporter Tyre examines troubling statistics that detail the academic decline of boys and cites psychologists, sociologists, brain researchers, and others to explain the reasons behind the numbers.

Tyre examines how schools—and broader society—have changed in ways that shortchange boys and how gender politics is affecting reactions to the dire statistics.

She focuses on boys' specific problems—fidgeting in school, scattered attention, reading problems, and a shortage of male teachers.

Through vignettes, Tyre offers advice to parents concerned about their sons. Most important, Tyre asks the ultimate question: how to help boys without jeopardizing the advances of girls.

From Teachers Union Facts:

Today the Center for Union Facts (CUF) announced the “winners” of its “Ten Worst Union-Protected Teachers” contest, which the group launched in March 2008.

The contest allowed anyone 13 and older to nominate the worst union-protected teachers in America through CUF’s website www.TeachersUnionExposed.com. After receiving over 600 nominations, CUF has identified the ten worst and offered each of them $10,000 to quit the profession forever. The purpose of the contest was to illustrate that unions have made it so difficult and costly to get rid of bad teachers that it can be easier to pay them to quit.

“Unsurprisingly, none of the ‘winners’ chose to take the prize money,” said CUF Executive Director Richard Berman. “When your job security is virtually guaranteed--due to outrageous union tenure rules--regardless of your performance, why would you quit for $10,000?”

Here are some examples of “winning” behavior verified by news reports:

• “Winner” had sex with two of her male teen students. She was warned by the school principal and colleagues to stop driving students home after school, and she also allegedly bought students alcohol. She now teaches second-graders.
• “Winner” had already been accused of fondling a teenage girl when three girls accused him of making lewd comments. Investigators found him guilty of "conduct unbecoming of a school board employee." His punishment: write out the district's sexual harassment policies.
• “Winner” pulled up, drunk, to the drive-thru window of a fast-food restaurant. After ordering, he became angry that he wasn’t getting his food fast enough, so he took out a gun and started waving it at restaurant employees. After his arrest, he pled no contest to all charges and was sent to jail. His students, meanwhile, were told he was caring for an ill family member. Once he was out of jail he was reinstated for several months before the media got wind of the story.

Progressives too often treat minority / disadvantaged students as if their demographic determined their destiny. These children are treated like second-class educational citizens rather than calling everyone up to the same high standard.

But the Pacific Research Institute has released a new study comparing trends in academic achievement in California to those in Florida.

Here are just some of the findings:

• Florida’s Hispanic students outscore the statewide average for all students in California on NAEP’s 4th Grade Reading Exam.
• Florida’s Free and Reduced lunch eligible Hispanics outscore the statewide average for all students in California.
• Florida’s African-American students are within striking distance of the statewide average for all students in California
• Florida’s free or reduced lunch eligible students attending inner city schools outscore the statewide average for all California students.

If you set the bar high, the children will rise to the occasion, regardless of their demographic background.

Much of the problems we have today come from wooly-headed romantic educational reformers.

HT: Matthew Ladner

The US waited until the last second, but we finally won one medal in this year’s games.

The ninth graders excelled on a civics subtest which “measures the abilities of a country’s students to distinguish fact from opinion, interpret political cartoons, and comprehend political messages.”

Go Team USA!

Get the full story at edolympics.net.

We’ve been talking about the brouhaha over what progressives have dubbed “education paternalism”.

George Will has piled on about this as well. He defines paternalism as follows: “Paternalism is the restriction of freedom for the good of the person restricted.”

Progressives only want to restrict the freedom of what kids can eat, drink, smoke, and chew. Everything else is fine for them to do.

By George Will in the Washington Post:

OAKLAND, Calif. - Seated at a solitary desk in the hall outside a classroom, the slender 13-year-old boy with a smile like a sunrise earnestly does remedial algebra, assisted by a paid tutor. She, too, is 13. Both wear the uniform - white polo shirt, khaki slacks - of a school that has not yet admitted the boy. It will, because he refuses to go away.

The son of Indian immigrants from Mexico, the boy decided he is going to be a doctor, heard about the American Indian Public Charter School here and started showing up. Ben Chavis, AIPCS' benevolent dictator, told the boy that although he was doing well at school, he was not up to the rigors of AIPCS, which is decorated with photographs of the many students it has sent to the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. So the boy asked, what must I do?

Telling young people what they must do is what Chavis does. With close-cropped hair and a short beard flecked with gray, he looks somewhat like Lenin, but is less democratic. A Lumbee Indian from North Carolina, he ran track, earned a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, got rich in real estate ("I wanted to buy back America and lease it to the whites") and decided to fix the world, beginning with AIPCS.

Founded in 1996, it swiftly became a multiculturalists' playground where much was tolerated and little was learned. Chavis arrived in 2000 to reverse that condition. Charter schools are not unionized, so he could trim the dead wood, which included all but one staff member.

David Whitman, in his book "Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism," reports that in Chicago, from 2003 through 2006, just three of every 1,000 teachers received an "unsatisfactory" rating in annual evaluations; in 87 "failing schools" - with below average and declining test scores - 67 had no teachers rated unsatisfactory; in all of Chicago, just nine teachers received more than one unsatisfactory rating and none of them was dismissed. Chavis' teachers come from places such as Harvard, Dartmouth, Oberlin, Columbia, Berkeley, Brown and Wesleyan.

You cannot get rid of poor teachers in the government schools. Who wins? The teachers unions, which keep their union dues flowing in from the dead wood.

Who loses: the kids.

Who cares? Apparently very few people.

AIPCS is one of six highly prescriptive schools Whitman studied, where "noncognitive skills" - responsible behaviors such as self-discipline and cooperativeness - are part of the cultural capital the curriculum delivers. Many inner-city schools feature a monotonous chaos of disruption. AIPCS - Oakland's highest performing middle school - stresses obligation, not self-expression. Chavis, now "administrator emeritus," is adamant: "Everyone says we should 'preserve our culture.' There is a lot of our culture we should wipe out."

A visitor to an AIPCS classroom notices that the children do not notice visitors. Students are taught to sit properly - no slumping - and keep their eyes on the teacher. No makeup, no jewelry, no electronic devices. AIPCS' 200 pupils take just 20 minutes for lunch and are with the same teacher in the same classroom all day. Rotating would consume at least 10 minutes, seven times a day. Seventy minutes a day in AIPCS' extra-long 196-day school year would be a lot of lost instruction. The school does not close for Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day or Cesar Chavez Day.

Paternalism is the restriction of freedom for the good of the person restricted. AIPCS acts in loco parentis because Chavis, who is cool toward parental involvement, wants an enveloping school culture that combats the culture of poverty and the streets.

He and other practitioners of the new paternalism - once upon a time, schooling was understood as democracy's permissible, indeed obligatory, paternalism - are proving that cultural pessimists are mistaken: We know how to close the achievement gap that often separates minorities from whites before kindergarten and widens through high school. A growing cohort of people possess the pedagogic skills to make "no excuses" schools flourish.

Unfortunately, powerful factions fiercely oppose the flourishing. Among them are education schools with their romantic progressivism - teachers should be mere "enablers" of group learning; self-esteem is a prerequisite for accomplishment, not a consequence thereof. Other opponents are the teachers' unions and their handmaiden, the Democratic Party. Today's liberals favor paternalism - you cannot eat trans fats; you must buy health insurance - for everyone except children. Odd.

You know that you are in a farming community when you read something like this.

I’m surprised that “global warming” wasn’t attributed as the cause for the school year delay.

From the Daily News:

Colton School Board members have reached a compromise on plans to delay the start of school due to harvest.

The board decided at its meeting Thursday to push the start date back two days, from Tuesday to Thursday.

Almost one-third of Colton's high school students will be helping with harvest this year, Superintendent C. Dale Foley said.

"A lot of students help in the fields for summer jobs" and others volunteer, he said.

School board members couldn't agree whether to excuse the students for the four days they will miss to work the harvest or to delay the start of school for a week.

Some board members thought four days would be too much for students to make up, while others were concerned about how the delay would affect students who aren't working on the harvest. There also were concerns that parents would have short notice to make arrangements for someone to watch their young children.

Board chairman Gary Riedner proposed delaying the start date for two days and excusing students working on harvest for two days as well. Board members agreed.

The two days will be added at the end of the school year, which now will end June 9 rather than June 5.

At least they didn’t play the MSD game of adding 2 minutes onto the end of every day to makeup the missed classes. Yea, like that works.

This article confirms many suspicions I’ve had.

First, there is a high demand for a law school in Boise.

Second, that many students come to Moscow because the college is here, not for the “friendly squirrels.”

Third, that Sen. Schroeder’s concerns about UI (Moscow) enrollment dwindling even further if a branch campus were to open in Boise is probably realistic. BSU has eclipsed UI in enrollment and status. IMO, UI can either leverage that fact or succumb to it.

As reported in today’s edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.

Randy Todd wouldn't hesitate to go to law school in Boise.

"I love Moscow, but I didn't come to college for a cute town: I came for a job," said the second-year University of Idaho College of Law student. "Moscow's not exactly a hub of legal activity."

Those jobs are in the state capital, said Todd, who was among seven of nine UI law students interviewed Friday who said they'd take advantage of the university's plans to begin offering third-year legal education in Boise.

The UI had sought approval from the Idaho State Board of Education to expand all three years of legal education offerings to Boise. The proposal was amended Thursday by the board, which voted to allow the college to only provide third-year legal education in Boise. The university still must receive funding for the plan from the state Legislature.

Although Todd believes the UI's dual-location plan for the College of Law made more sense, he said he'd take any opportunities the university offered in Boise.

First-year law students Leon Samuels and Allison Blackman agreed. They hope the UI is able to implement the program in time for them to participate.

The two students who indicated they would not be interested in a third-year program in Boise both came from out of state and said they aren't looking to get jobs in the Treasure Valley.

Board of education member Paul Agidius, a Moscow lawyer and UI law graduate, expressed his concerns about the plan Thursday. He's afraid the Moscow campus will begin to hemorrhage third-year students if they have the option of moving to Boise.

If they are worried about this, they could make the openings in Boise available to the students with the highest GPA’s — best and brightest get the first choice to stay in Moscow or go to Boise.

Mitchell Landsberg over at the L.A. Times weighs in on the US being tied with Botswana in the Educational Olypics.

At least on MSM paper has picked up on this story.

Where's Michael Phelps when we need him?

It's Day 9 of the Olympics, and it looks like the United States is tied in the overall medal competition with ... let's see ... Botswana!

Oh, and Kuwait. And Togo. And Uzbekistan. And a few others.

Which is to say, we have a big fat zero. A goose egg. Nada. Zilch.

Finland, meanwhile, leads the rankings with 32 medals, followed by Hong Kong (26), Japan (13) and New Zealand (11).

You've probably gotten the idea by now. These are results of the Education Olympics, a conceit dreamed up by the folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, who seem to think that our national priorities are a bit askew when we RULE beach volleyball but are barely in the game when it comes to international educational rankings. (Which, we would like to point out, are not conducted in bikinis, so that's a problem right there.)

There are those, to be sure, who don't put much stock in these international comparisons, which include the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and the Civic Education Study (CIVED).

Those PISA people can't even spell program correctly! Who's going to trust them?

But others, apparently including the Fordham Institute, think we ought to be paying attention to the fact that our students lag behind their counterparts in, among other places, Estonia and Slovenia. (No offense intended, Estonians and Slovenians!)

Incidentally, if you think NBC overdoes it with tape-delayed competitions, the Education Olympics are based on test results that were released months or even years ago. So as we head toward Day 10, you can slide back off the edge of your chair.

Spoiler alert: There will be no last-minute comeback for the United States in these Olympics. We're going down. Anyone want to make a prediction for 2012?

I’m not sure if my readers have been following a big stink that’s occurred in the education world.

If you’ve not, here’s my chance to fill you in!

Last week, Education Excellence released David Whitman’s “Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism”. The book recounts the tale of six inner-city secondary schools that have succeeded in closing the achievement gap.

That word “paternalism” has caused seismic tremors among the educational progressives.

But by “paternalistic schools” Whitman means “no excuses schools” — schools where you won’t be pampered and coddled; but where you will be taught and expected to learn and follow the rules.

Quite a novel idea.

Well, George Will weighed in on this matter today in the Washington Post:

Paternalism is the restriction of freedom for the good of the person restricted. [The American Indian Public Charter School] (AIPCS) acts in loco parentis because [principal Ben] Chavis, who is cool toward parental involvement, wants an enveloping school culture that combats the culture of poverty and the streets.

He and other practitioners of the new paternalism—once upon a time, schooling was understood as democracy’s permissible, indeed obligatory, paternalism—are proving that cultural pessimists are mistaken: We know how to close the achievement gap that often separates minorities from whites before kindergarten and widens through high school. A growing cohort of people possess the pedagogic skills to make “no excuses” schools flourish.

Unfortunately, powerful factions fiercely oppose the flourishing. Among them are education schools with their romantic progressivism—teachers should be mere “enablers” of group learning; self-esteem is a prerequisite for accomplishment, not a consequence thereof. Other opponents are the teachers unions and their handmaiden, the Democratic Party. Today’s liberals favor paternalism—you cannot eat trans fats; you must buy health insurance—for everyone except children. Odd.

Here’s a video describing what all the hoopla is about.

This is the segment featuring The MATCH School, a public charter high school in Boston, Massachusetts aired on October 7, 2007. MATCH has recently been named one of the "Top 100" high schools in the nation by US News & World Report (Nov. 29, 2007).

Tough-love = paternalism? I don’t think so.

The Americans still haven’t won a single medal at the 2008 Education Olympics.

Finland and Hong Kong are tied for first with 32 medals each, however.

Hey, Chris W: Japan has 15!

Full coverage at edolympics.net.

This may be of interest to my readers who are teachers.

This video, "Learning Styles Don't Exist", is from University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham

What he says here is opposite of what I was taught concerning the three different learning styles:

• Visual
• Auditory
• Kinesthetic

The DN has put a positive spin on it.

State board approves amended law school plan

The LMT a different one:

State board says no to UI law school branch campus in Boise

Would students want to do two years in Moscow followed by one year in Boise, when they could do all three years in Boise with Concordia?

This compromise looks like a setup for failure.

The Idaho State Board of Education approved an amended plan for the UI College of Law to provide the third year of legal education in Boise. A proposal for a full dual location model was sent back to the UI to be revisited.

The third year of legal education will be offered in Boise beginning in July 2009, pending approval from the state Legislature of a $1 million appropriation request, said Mark Browning, spokesman for the board.

The board debated the plan for nearly 3 hours, Browning said, after a presentation to the board by Don Burnett, dean of the College of Law.

The plan detailed the UI’s proposal to split legal education between the Moscow campus and a branch campus in Boise. The additional campus would start small, with a first-year class of about 30 students in 2010, and would eventually grow to support 250 students.

Browning said there was some question from the board as to whether the numbers projected by the UI were solid. He said the UI was instructed to revisit their calculations for the demand for legal education services. The university also needs to make sure there’s enough support for the proposal by the people who would allocate the money, Browning said.

If the board eventually approves a three-year campus in Boise, the state legislature is in charge of appropriating funds, which would also have to be approved by the governor.

Browning said the feeling of the board is that the time is not right to make a big leap, but that they want to start taking smaller steps down that same path.

“They were very clear in saying, 'We don’t want this to go away. We see this as a strategic move. You need a presence (in Boise). We need you to have a presence there,’ ” Browning said.

Sounds like this takes care of that question.

IMO, another setback for the UI.

From the Idaho Statesman:

The Idaho State Board of Education has rejected the University of Idaho's plan to have a full law school in Boise.

Instead, the governor-appointed members of the board have asked the university to explore the option of allowing law students to spend their full third year in the Treasure Valley, where most of the state's attorneys live and work.

The 6-2 decision was made at the board's meeting in Pocatello Thursday.

HT: Carl W.

They didn’t quote Dean Atwood from NSA

As reported in today’s edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.

Washington State University freshman Erica Turlington said the legal drinking age doesn't have much bearing on the availability of alcohol.

Cougar classmates Michael Running and Doug Higbee agreed, saying it's fast and easy to find alcohol if they want it.

Turlington is 19; Running and Higbee both are 18.

"I think lowering the drinking age would create more responsibility about drinking," Higbee said.

Leaders at 123 of the nation's colleges and universities share that belief and have signed an initiative intended to reopen the debate over the legal drinking age.

Amethyst Initiative supporters include the presidents of the College of Idaho, Tufts University and Duke University. They are urging elected officials to rethink the 21-year-old drinking age, which they say has had dangerous unintended consequences.

University of Idaho President Steven Daley-Laursen and Washington State University President Elson S. Floyd say their respective universities will not be among the signatories.

"As a public institution, we abide by the rules of our state," Daley-Laursen stated in an e-mail.

Floyd, also in an e-mail, stated that although he believes the issue of irresponsible drinking would benefit from public debate, he does not believe determining the legal drinking age is the most productive focus for the university. 

This year, Brigham Young University-Idaho was next, followed by the University of Idaho, Idaho State University and BYU.

Yet another kick in the butt for the University of Idaho and another vote of no-confidence by Idaho high school students.

From the Idaho Statesman:

Boise State University is the first choice of college-bound Idaho high school seniors who took the ACT, and that is reflected in the rising quality of the student body, President Bob Kustra told students and faculty Wednesday morning.

In his annual State of the University speech, Kustra outlined the university's major construction projects, summarized fundraising achievements, and described the rising admissions standards of Idaho's largest university.

The number of incoming students at Boise State who rank in the top quarter of their high school class increased 10 percent between 2004 and 2007, Kustra said. The incoming freshmen also include 10 National Merit Scholars.

While the five-story buildings rising on campus are a visible sign of the university's growth, "the most important aspects of change can't be seen," said Kustra, referring to student and faculty achievement. He added that students who take the ACT, the national college entrance exam, list Boise State as their first choice for higher education. According to the ACT Web site, Boise State was the first choice among Idaho high school graduates from 2005 to this year. This year, Brigham Young University-Idaho was next, followed by the University of Idaho, Idaho State University and BYU.

No data is available on the site from before 2005.

Boise State's enrollment is expected to hit 20,000 for the first time when classes start next Monday.

Now this is an example of how the University of Idaho is a world-class research institution.

From World Nuclear News:

Areva and the University of Idaho have signed an agreement to develop technology for recovering uranium from incinerator ash at Areva's uranium fuel plant in Richland, Washington state. The process also reduces the amount of ash classified as radioactive waste.

Chien Wai, a chemistry professor at the University of Idaho, has developed a process that uses supercritical fluids to dissolve toxic metals. When this process is coupled with a purifying process developed in partnership with Sydney Koegler, an engineer with Areva and former student at the University of Idaho, enriched uranium can be recovered from the ashes of contaminated materials. Wai and Koegler have worked together for four years on the uranium extraction project.
…
Construction of the ash-uranium recovery plant will begin in 2008 and should be operational in 2009. It will take about one year to process the 32 tonnes of ash at Richland, after which the plant could process ash from other LLW generators in the nuclear energy and nuclear medicine industries.

The technology licensing agreement will allow Areva to use several of Wai's discoveries to extract the metals from the ash. Areva has provided funding for the research and will gain rights to the University of Idaho's share of a joint patent developed in cooperation with Wai that further separates the enriched uranium from the extracted metals.

"Radioactive waste is a big problem facing the United States and the entire world," Wai said. "We need new, innovative technology, and I think supercritical fluid is one such technology that will play an important role in the very near future."

That was the question posed by Rick Warren to Sen. Obama the other night.

Here’s Obama’s reply:

"If you are making $150,000 a year or less as a family, then you're middle class, or you may be poor. But 150 (thousand dollars) down, you're basically middle class. Obviously, it depends on region and where you're living. I don't know what housing prices are doing lately. I would argue that if you're making more than 250,000 (dollars), then you're in the top 3, 4 percent of this country. You're doing well. Now, these things are all relative, and I'm not suggesting that everybody who is making over 250,000 (dollars) is living on easy street.

"But the question that I think we have to ask ourselves is, if we believe in good schools, if we believe in good roads, if we want to make sure that kids can go to college, if we don't want to leave a mountain of debt for the next generation, then we've got to pay for these things. They don't come for free. I believe it is irresponsible intergenerationally for us to invest or for us to spend $10 billion a month on a war and not have a way of paying for it. That, I think, is unacceptable. Under the approach I'm taking, if you make $150,000 or less, you will see a tax cut. If you're making $250,000 a year or more, you're going to see a modest increase."

Here’s McCain’s reply:

"I don't want to take any money from the rich. I want everybody to get rich. I don't believe in class warfare or redistribution of wealth. Let's keep taxes low. Let's give every family in America a $7,000 tax credit for every child they have. Let's give them a $5,000 refundable tax credit to go out and get the health insurance of their choice. Let's not have the government take over the health care system in America.

"And, my friend, it was not taxes that mattered in America in the last several years. It was spending. Spending got completely out of control. We spent money in a way that mortgaged our kids' future. My friends, we spent $3 million of your money to study the DNA of bears in Montana. Now, I don't know if that was a paternity issue or a criminal issue. But the point is, it was $3 million of your money.

"So it doesn't matter, really, what my definition of 'rich' is because I don't want to raise anybody's taxes. I really don't. In fact, I want to give working Americans a better shot at having a better life."